I know the mkv files are more compact. Do you see any visual quality loss from the conversion?

Also, can you save it in 720p mkv format instead of the original 1080i to save even more space ?

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MKV files aren't in themselves more compact. The ones you find online are more compact because they have been recoded to H.264. The default option is to simply pass through the original video as-is, but we also offer full transcoding so you can convert to H.264 if you want.

As for the question about 720p... the only issue with doing this is the frame rate. Some players expect 720p video to be 59.94fps, but VideoReDo does not have the ability to double the frame rate so when you convert a 1080i file to 720p the resulting file will still be 29.97fps which can cause problems with some hardware players that are hard coded to expect 59.94fps. That being said I think TiVo can play these files fine, so not really an issue in the context of TiVo.

What format are you saving to? MP4? If so are you pushing them to a TiVo using pyTiVo or are you pulling them from the TiVo itself?

Dan

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I have tried both .mp4 & .mkv pulling them to the TiVo. I shall try pushing them to see if that works. I still would like to figure out how to get VideoReDo to convert to h.264 so that the TiVo can pull them over, if not, I can just leave them in MPEG2.

Not quite. However when you pull a file that is not .tivo or .mpg it will be recoded back to MPEG-2 on the fly. If you're using TiVo Desktop you have to use the Plus version to do this. pyTiVo can do it for free, but you need to make sure your FFmpeg build is up to date or it can cause problems.

The only way to get native H.264 video onto a TiVo is to push it from the PC to the TiVo using pyTiVo. And in that case it has to be in an MP4 container and the MOOV atom has to be at the start of the file. (default in VRD, but can be disabled by user)